


You Must Remember This

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1930s, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, WWII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2016-07-15
Packaged: 2018-07-24 04:47:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7494384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before the war, all of Steve's memories are shared.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Must Remember This

**Author's Note:**

> Title stolen unashamedly from "As Time Goes By." Reposted from tumblr, beta'ed by the brilliant cabloom.

Before the war, Steve jokes that he shares his past, since he’s pretty sure he doesn’t have a single memory that Bucky isn’t in.  (It’s not true, of course, but it  _ feels  _ true, the way Bucky elbows him in his brittle ribs and says, “Hey, Stevie, you remember that time -”  It is those memories, told with laughter and the voice of a happy young man he will never hear again, that survive the ice.)

It’s not true after the war starts, though Steve thinks more than once that he would sell his first hazy memories – the curve of his mother’s smile in crimson red and the lilt of the first song he knew – if he could have Bucky’s memories of the 107th, instead.  (This is war, yes, and war is hell, but Steve can see the memories haunting Bucky’s eyes, at night, and knows that suffering is better shared.  Bucky won’t share anything about the factory, though, and Steve had been failing to save him for months before the fall.)

Steve is _angry_ , when they pull him out of the ice and back into the fight.  Angry at Stark, for looking, angry at the US government for “saving” him, angry at the serum for keeping him alive.  Angry at God, for dropping him into a world where everyone he loves is dead or dying.  It gets better, slowly, as he talks to Dugan’s children, works with Jones’s grandson, reads Peggy’s SSR records and the newspaper clipping on Monty’s home for lost boys, goes to Dernier’s vineyard and stands in front of the law practice that Morita built from the ground, without a college degree but determined to help the dispossessed regain what was theirs.

His friends had lived their lives – lived full, wonderful lives, and Steve wasn’t so small that he would dwell on the resentment in his gut that he hadn’t joined them.  (He’d never intended to, after all.  It had been his choice, to save the world and not himself.  It had been his choice, to love a boy and learn that the boy had belonged to the war in the end.)

He makes new memories, fresh and neon bright and lonely, doesn’t bother to write them down or speak them aloud, doesn’t carry them close like the memories that begin with an arm too heavy around his shoulders, a grin and the Brooklyn patter of a boy’s voice.  He reaches out for Bucky every night, turns to him in the grocer’s to complain about the price of eggs, pushes through the DC crowd to catch up to a dark-haired man that he doesn’t know, thinking like a boy in Brooklyn and not the thawed shell of the person Steve Rogers had been.

Of course, the Winter Soldier isn’t Bucky, no matter that he remembers Sarah Rogers’s soft smile or the clear soprano of her voice when she sang them to sleep.  That’s okay, though.  Steve Rogers isn’t Stevie, either, but that makes no difference at all to how fiercely he loves.  (It makes no difference at all, since Steve is determined that they will share a future, with Bucky’s voice in his ear over the comm during a fight, muttering, “One day, Steve, I swear to god we’re going to -”  It is those plans, after all, that make it worth the fight.)


End file.
